Turf war brews on sale of Sheehan's Camp Casey

Turf war brews over sale of Sheehan's Camp CaseyLand that defined the peace movement is up for grabs

LISA SANDBERG, San Antonio Express-News

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, June 2, 2007

Photo: MATT SLOCUM, AP

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War supporters want to buy Camp Casey, while peace activists hope to keep the symbolic land.

War supporters want to buy Camp Casey, while peace activists hope to keep the symbolic land.

Photo: MATT SLOCUM, AP

Turf war brews on sale of Sheehan's Camp Casey

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CRAWFORD — Opponents and backers of George W. Bush have been sparring here, in the president's backyard, over issues of war and peace since Bush took office and began military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, a new conflict is brewing: ownership of the 5-acre patch of turf — the "heart and soul" of the U.S. peace movement, as one protester put it — that activist mom Cindy Sheehan is planning to sell next week on eBay for upward of $80,000.

Robert Dixon, the executive director of Move America Forward, a California-based grass-roots organization that backs the U.S. mission in Iraq, said his group is prepared to do "whatever we have to" to purchase Camp Casey, which lies just a few miles from the president's ranch.

His mission: to replace the memorial of white crosses to fallen U.S. service members erected by the anti-war activists with a memorial to fallen U.S. service members to be erected by defenders of the war in Iraq.

Sheehan, perhaps the anti-war movement's most visible face who this week said she's resigning from her public role, "won't sell it to them for $5 million, not on a cold day in hell," said Sheehan's sister, Dede Miller, 48.

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Not knowingly, anyway. Miller acknowledged her sister, whose son, Casey, a U.S. Army specialist, was killed in Iraq in 2004, could be fooled if middlemen get involved in the bidding.

So far, Sheehan, 49, hasn't received any serious offers from anti-war groups, but there's still time — and hope, Miller said.

Anti-war activist Carl Rising-Moore said land sale notwithstanding, Camp Casey would remain the symbolic center of the anti-war movement. "Camp Casey is a state of mind," he said from the campground along FM 317.

Protesters, he said, would remain in Crawford; they'll just move up the road, to the ditches where Sheehan and others first set up camp in 2005. A new ordinance may ban tents along roads, but it says nothing about "throwing down a bed roll," noted Rising-Moore, 61, a Vietnam-era veteran.

Moving on

Sheehan bought the land now named for her son last year for $52,000 in insurance money she received after his death.

She was a frequent visitor to the camp but recently began having serious misgivings. She was exhausted, angry that congressional Democrats approved more funding for the war and angry that she was being attacked by members of her own movement for publicly attacking Democrats.

On Memorial Day, according to her sister, Sheehan received a particularly nasty e-mail from a fellow protester.

"She could take it when the right was attacking her, but when it was folks that were supposed to be on the same side, it was too much," said Miller.

In a blog she posted the same day, Sheehan surprised even those close to her by saying she was through with the peace movement, and would be returning immediately to her native California to "be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I lost."

Folks in town say they won't miss her one bit.

Franklin Abel, 66, Crawford's mayor pro tem, who thinks the world of the president, called Sheehan "a sore spot" for everyone. He said he hoped she'd take her "hell-raising" protesters with her.

Abel said he believed in the right to protest. But these protesters, he said, had a certain "attitude."

Though she may be a minority in Crawford, Carla Drake, 38, is among the majority of Americans now opposed to the war in Iraq. But she has no use for those who flock to her hometown in opposition to that war.